Tuesday, January 12, 2016

David Bowie, January 8, 1947 – January 10, 2016. Obituary

The influence on popular culture of David Bowie, who died today following an 18-month fight against cancer,
simply cannot be overstated. From psychedelic folk rock to glam rock,
plastic soul, avant garde experimentalism and beyond, Bowie's relentless
innovation and reinvention was one of the great driving forces of
modern music and his impact reached into fashion, performance art, film
and sexual politics. While his songs, consistently accessible no matter
how difficult the style he explored, inspired countless musicians across
a vast tapestry of rock music which he helped weave as he went. His
shape-shifting nature – which Bowie himself put down to restlessness and
boredom – laid the blueprint of what a pop star should be: chameleonic,
enigmatic, seductively alien and constantly challenging society’s
accepted boundaries of personal freedom and expression.

Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke and Major Tom; his
mastery is encapsulated in the roles he so briefly adopted and so
casually discarded for each phase of his career, and to the man behind
the masks every superlative applies. Icon, legend, starman.

Born David Robert Jones on January 8 1947 in Brixton, London, Bowie’s
talents first emerged in dance and movement classes at Burnt Ash Junior
School at the age of nine, his interpretive dance described as “vividly
artistic” and “astonishing” by teachers. His introduction to music via
his father’s US rock 'n' roll records and his half-brother’s interest in
modern jazz inspired him to join a skiffle group as a child and take up
the plastic alto saxophone in 1961, while studying art, music and
design at Bromley Technical High School. In 1962, the same year a fight
with his future artwork collaborator George Underwood left him with a
permanently dilated pupil that gave him the appearance of having
different coloured eyes, a 15-year-old Jones formed his first rock 'n'
roll band, The Konrads, and his restless nature soon came out. Shifting
through groups including the King Bees, Manish Boys, Lower Third, the
Buzz and Riot Squad over the course of five years, Jones eventually
signed a solo deal and took the name David Bowie in 1967, to avoid
further confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees.

Bowie’s debut solo single ‘The Laughing Gnome’ and the surreal
psychedelic music hall of its eponymous parent album, a cousin to the
music of Anthony Newley, Tommy Steele, early Floyd and The Kinks,
remains a curio. It wasn’t until Bowie met dancer Lindsey Kemp and
became immersed in London’s bohemian art, theatre and dance scene that
his lengthy golden period of creativity and reinvention began. ‘Space
Oddity’, the 1969 lead single from his second self-titled album released
to coincide with the ill-fated Apollo 11 mission, became his first
major Top Five hit, yet he quickly shifted his sound towards dark and
paranoid rock for 1970’s ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ and amalgamated
the two for 1972’s seminal ‘Hunky Dory’, recently voted by NME
as the third best album ever made, thanks to such timeless classics as
‘Life On Mars’, ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘Changes’. His image was also in
constant flux, incorporating outlandish fashions and hairstyles and
indulging in androgyny; Bowie, who met and married Angie Barnett in
1969, would later claim to be bisexual.

These disparate splatters of image and ideas would cohere in the alien
rock god form of Ziggy Stardust, tragic hero of 1973’s ‘The Rise And
Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars’ and the otherworldly
creature who made every teenager in Britain want to be a pop star simply
by wiggling his finger down the Top Of The Pops camera and cooing “I had to phone someone so I picked on you”.
Ziggy became a phenomenon of the glam age but, reflecting Ziggy's
demise on the album, Bowie killed off the character onstage at the
height of his success, to reportedly orgiastic scenes at the Hammersmith
Odeon.

Over the coming decades, and despite developing a cocaine addiction that
would see him become a virtual recluse in Los Angeles “in a state of
psychic terror” in the mid-70s, Bowie would repeatedly reinvent his
music and persona to critical and cultural acclaim. After two further
glam character albums in ‘Aladdin Sane’ and the Orwellian ‘Diamond Dogs’
he discarded the style in favour of what he called ‘plastic soul’ on
1975’s ‘Young Americans’. Just one year later he released the bleak,
experimental ‘Station To Station’ and toured under the monochrome
persona of The Thin White Duke, a character inspired by Bowie’s interest
in Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley and the occult and described as an
“emotionless Aryan superman”, right down to expounding the benefits of
fascism in interviews and allegedly performing a Nazi salute at Victoria
station. His experimental bent, and efforts to kick cocaine, then led
him to Berlin where, alongside Iggy Pop, Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, he
recorded his most avant garde '70s work over the legendary trilogy of
‘Low’, ‘”Heroes”’ and ‘Lodger’.

Critics and fans alike were constantly amazed and inspired by Bowie’s
creative and personal shifts and his innovative stage shows – from the
dystopia of ‘Diamond Dogs’ to the Thin White Duke’s German Expressionist
starkness and the interpretive dance spectacle of the Glass Spider tour
– but Bowie himself claimed it was down to “attention deficit
disorder”; he simply couldn’t stay interested in any one thing for more
than an album or two. As his success peaked in the early 80s, reaching
Number One by revisiting the story of Major Tom on ‘Ashes To Ashes’ and
selling seven million copies of his funk pop collaboration with Nile
Rogers ‘Let’s Dance’ in 1983, he allowed himself to slip into a groove.
“Artistically it was probably my lowest point,” he’d say of his mid-80s
output, but at the same time he was expanding on his polymath status. He
performed interpretive dance pieces at fashion events, followed up his
perfectly cast turn as an alien visitor in Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth
with a string of film roles in films such as Labyrinth, Absolute
Beginners and The Last Temptation Of Christ, a sideline he’d pursue
right up to playing Nikolai Tesla in 2006’s The Prestige – and developed his business interests to the point where he created his own radio station, bank and Bowie Bonds.

Over the coming decades Bowie would return to his restless,
boundary-pushing ways, delving into metallic rock with the under-rated
Tin Machine, and industrial, drum’n’bass, jungle and jazztronica on solo
albums such as ‘Earthling’, ‘Outside’ and ‘Heathen’. His vision was
far-reaching; an early internet adopter he was amongst the first to
explore downloading and launched his own service provider. When he
disappeared from the public eye following 2003’s ‘Reality’ many thought
he’d said his final piece on rock music, so it was with to shock and
delight that he released ‘Where Are We Now?’ with no warning on his 66th
birthday in 2013, and a fantastic new album ‘The Next Day’ within two
months. Where 'The Next Day' occasionally saw Bowie look back on the
past, the follow-up, 'Blackstar', released just two days before his
death, saw him forging forwards to another new sound.

It’s fitting that the last years of his life were characterised by
fervent creativity, some of the strongest and most passionate studio
performances of his career and deep secrecy. It means that one of the
greatest talents that rock music has ever seen leaves us the way he
lived. A glorious, unknowable enigma.